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ICSD News

January 2018

ICSD and Material Research

December 2017

ICSD web version 3.7.0 released

December 2017

ICSD now contains 193,878 crystal structures

Featured article

Analysis of spinel compounds in ICSD

ICSD enables scientists to search for text in titles in combination with chemical compound information, e.g., compound classes which cannot be described through specific compound information such as the molecular formula. An interesting example for such a compound class is provided by the spinel compounds.

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ICSD - Inorganic Crystal Structure Database

Reliable crystal structure data of high quality play an important part in optimizing the development of new materials which foster innovation in various areas. Crystallographic data can serve to explain and predict material properties. Therefore, material testing laboratories and researchers at universities and research institutions are dependent on evaluated crystal structure data.

FIZ Karlsruhe provides the scientific and the industrial community with the world's largest database for completely identified inorganic crystal structures, ICSD, containing about 193,000 peer-reviewed data entries including their atomic coordinates dating back to 1913. The ICSD data are of excellent quality. Only data which have passed thorough quality checks are included.

As the world’s leading provider of scientific information on inorganic crystal structures, we take full responsibility for database production, maintenance and quality control, and we ensure that the ICSD database and our software solutions meet the highest possible quality standards.

At present, the ICSD contains more than 193,000 entries, including

2,522 crystal structures of the elements

36,659 records for binary compounds

70,881 records for ternary compounds

69,900 records for quarternary and quintenary compounds

About 154,000 entries (80%) have been assigned a structure type. There are currently 9,004 structure prototypes.

The content of ICSD goes through an ongoing re-evaluation and update procedure. Each year around 4,000 new structures are added while the existing content will be modified, complemented or duplicates are removed. From 2008 to 2013 we incorporated legacy crystal structure data on metallic and intermetallic compounds from our cooperation partner, the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, USA, into the ICSD database. This included testing and duplicate checking besides an extensive evaluation process.The graphic below shows that the content of ICSD is not static. The main effort lies in the inclusion of current data, but we continuously work on filling gaps from former years.